Friend-of-the-blog John Wills Lloyd has written about an interesting study in the latest issue of Pediatrics on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and its correlation to reading disabilities.
The study, which looked at more than 5,000 Minnesota youth, found that children with ADHD have dramatically higher rates of reading disabilities than youth without the disorder. The incidence of reading disabilities among boys with ADHD was 51 percent, and among girls it was 46.7 percent. For boys without ADHD, the reading disability rate among the study participants was 14.5 percent; among girls it was 7.7 percent.
This news is particularly noteworthy for girls, because those who don’t have ADHD have relatively low rate of reading disabilities, according to the study. The authors conclude: “Although the American Academy of Pediatrics clinical practice guideline on the diagnosis and evaluation of children with ADHD does not specifically recommend psychoeducational testing for every child with ADHD, our findings clearly demonstrate that it is essential for clinicians to assess all children with ADHD for the presence of comorbid [reading disabilities.]”